The Giller-nominated author and incoming City of Fredericton poet laureate, Fawn Parker, had written three novels, a story collection and two books of poetry before her latest novel, Hi, It’s Me.Penguin Randomhouse
Literature is often regarded as an unrivalled medium when it comes to exploring the subject of death.
In countless novels, mortality leads to questions about the eternity of the soul, but what about the body? Could the death of a loved one push someone suffering from body dysmorphia into obsessive considerations of the flesh?
This is the premise of Fawn Parker’s latest novel, Hi, It’s Me, which examines the events immediately after the medically assisted death of her cancer-stricken mother. The Giller-nominated author and incoming City of Fredericton poet laureate has written three other novels, a story collection and two books of poetry, but Hi, It’s Me’s unironic engagement with the epic form and its mirroring of James Joyce’s Ulysses is something of a departure for the New Brunswick-based author.
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“When I think about grief, I think the experience is so weird and absurd,” Parker says, accounting for the decision to devote years of her life to writing a tribute to her mother. “It’s been five years now since my mom died and I’m just now having the rational view of what happened.”
“I now see myself as sort of a young person to have lost a parent,” continues the 30-year-old Parker. “At the time, I just felt very old, like it aged me immediately. I think the weirdness – that sort of warping and stretching and shrinking of time that I was feeling – was something I didn’t feel able to communicate through memoir. I didn’t want to just tell the story of myself. I wanted to cast myself in this world that felt as absurd as the emotions and experiences I was having psychologically at that time.”
In the book, a fictionalized version of Parker arrives mere hours after her mother Elaine has ended her life. Fawn takes up her mother’s place in a soap-making feminist commune situated in an unidentified rural town, and prepares for the celebration of life that will occur that same night.
A last-minute change to Elaine’s will, however, has caused tumult among members of the commune, who were counting on the inheritance money to save the struggling business from receivership. With the money now going to Fawn exclusively, the future of the feminist social experiment is put in jeopardy.
An exhaustive account of grief and the feelings of inadequacy, regret and sadness that go along with it, Hi, It’s Me does not veer away from the eruptive emotions – both light and dark – that are released in times of mourning. Memories of tender maternal support compete with moments of unapproachable aloofness throughout the book, which is written in an articulate, anxiety-laden stream-of-consciousness style. In a moment of quickly dissipating anger, Fawn chastises the now deceased lawyer-academic Elaine for imprinting onto her a tainted familial legacy.
“Why did you make me into you?” Fawn asks herself while going through her mother’s paper archive. “If I have a child I will do everything in my power to shape them into something else entirely. You raised me to give myself away – to my own sick desires and to the sick desires of men. Why didn’t you stop me?”
“Boundary-blurring” became a useful method to interrogate her own wrenching feelings about her mother, whom Parker describes as a “difficult, powerful intellectual woman.” None of the literary frameworks (memoir, creative non-fiction) or tropes available to a writer seemed to get close to the feelings Parker experienced, and so a blending of form became a practical necessity: While all the elements of the book’s plot are novelistic fabrications, “emotionally, it’s 100-per-cent authentic because it’s all the feelings that I had that day.”
“I’d seen movies about mothers and daughters and death where you’re supposed to be upset and crying and healing,” Parker says. “It wasn’t like that – it was just awkward and I found myself unable to say ‘I love you.’”
This inability to express affection at the critical moment becomes a major pivot point in the novel, and drives Fawn the narrator to consider a host of her other failings in a spiral of intrusive thinking that shows virtually no end until the final pages of the book. In that way, Parker says, the book is a testament to the “great questions of my life, however small or big those are.”
The fictionalized Fawn does not know what to do with her life after the funeral, and cannot conceive of an identity outside of her mother. “She doesn’t really believe in love, and she doesn’t understand her sexuality so she’s just spinning,” Parker says. “She doesn’t know how to just sit in her body. She hates it so she’s not feeding it.”
Parker, who is currently completing a PhD in creative writing at the University of New Brunswick, feels that she developed an interest in mad studies – the academic study of the experience of mental illness, disability and neurodivergence – because of the lack of mental-health care supports available to those living with body dysmorphia.
“I feel that it is never represented in literature in a way that feels authentic to my experience of anorexia nervosa, which is something I’ve been dealing with since I was five years old,” Parker says.
“What I really wanted to display, and less with an agenda and more just in a confessional way, is that it’s everything – it’s every minute of somebody’s life. It’s the lens through which I see the world and think.”
